Dubliners, by James Joyce

 

Dubliners 

James Joyce wrote Dubliners in his twenties, mostly while living outside Ireland, which gave him the particular vantage of the exile: intimate knowledge of the place combined with a distance that allowed him to see it as it was rather than as he would have preferred it to be. The result is a collection of fifteen stories that manages, in its quiet way, to be one of the most precise social diagnoses in modern literature.

The word Joyce used for what afflicted Dublin was 'paralysis' — not the dramatic paralysis of crisis but the slow, almost invisible paralysis of routine, of duty, of the fear of change that presents itself as contentment. His characters are people on the threshold of decision who find reasons, always plausible, always slightly pathetic, not to cross it.

In 'Araby,' a boy's romantic idealization of his neighbor's sister leads him to a bazaar that is nearly closed when he arrives, the evening's magic already dissipated — and in that moment of practical disappointment, something more permanent collapses. The story earns its famous final line, and earns it exactly as much as the boy's self-knowledge is precisely insufficient.

'Eveline' is perhaps the collection's purest study in paralysis: a young woman about to leave Ireland with a man who loves her, who stands at the gangplank and cannot board. The reasons she gives herself are not wrong, exactly, but they are not the real reason. The real reason is in the quality of the silence she retreats back into.

'The Dead,' which closes the collection and is twice as long as anything else in it, is simply one of the great short works in the language. Gabriel Conroy's evening of social management — he is the kind of man who worries constantly about how he is being perceived — ends with a revelation about his wife, and then a further revelation about himself, and then an expansion outward into something almost impersonal: the famous closing image of snow falling across Ireland, over the living and the dead alike.

Joyce's technical achievement in Dubliners — the way he uses concrete, specific detail to carry enormous emotional weight; the way his prose adjusts its register to the consciousness of each story's center — was the foundation of everything that followed. But the collection stands entirely on its own, as a portrait of a city and a people that refuses to be either sentimental or contemptuous, and manages thereby to be true.

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